In 1988, 11-year-old Dade "Zero Cool" Murphy's family is fined $45,000 for his crashing of 1,507 computer systems causing 7-point drop in the New York Stock Exchange. He is banned from computers and touch-tone telephones until he is 18 years old. On his 18th birthday he hacks into a local television station and changes the broadcast to an episode of The Outer Limits. Another hacker (handle "Acid Burn") counters Dade's attack. Dade identifies himself as "Crash Override".At school Dade becomes part of a group of hackers; Ramon "The Phantom Phreak" Sanchez, Emmanuel "Cereal Killer" Goldstein, Paul "Lord Nikon" Cook (named for his photographic memory), Joey Pardella (a novice hacker without alias)' and Kate "Acid Burn" Libby � the hacker who kicked him out of the TV network earlier.Joey, out to prove his skills, breaks into "The Gibson", an Ellingson Mineral Company supercomputer. While downloading a garbage file as proof of his feat, his mother disconnects his computer leaving him with a fragmented file. However, his intrusion has been noticed and brought to the attention of computer security officer Eugene "The Plague" Belford, a former hacker. Plague realizes the garbage file being downloaded is a worm he himself inserted to defraud Ellingson. Claiming the file is the code to the "Da Vinci" computer virus that will capsize the company's oil tanker fleet, and pretending the hackers are to blame, he enlists the US Secret Service to recover the file. In fact, The Plague had inserted the "Da Vinci" virus as a red herring to cover for his worm.Joey is arrested and his computer searched, but he had hidden the disk containing the file. Dade and Kate make a bet, with Dade choosing a date with Kate should he win, and Kate having Dade perform menial computing tasks if she prevails. The hacking duel is to harass Secret Service Agent Richard Gill who was involved in Joey's arrest. After various hacks including canceling Gill's credit cards, creating a personal ad in his name, fabricating a criminal record, and changing his payroll status to "deceased", the duel remains a tie.